Kennecott Mill Town

Kennecott is what remains of a company town built to haul copper out of one of the richest ore bodies ever found. Prospectors Clarence Warner and “Tarantula Jack” Smith staked the green outcrop above the Kennicott Glacier in 1900, and the engineer Stephen Birch soon secured the claims. In 1906 Birch joined with the Guggenheims and J.P. Morgan to form the Alaska Syndicate, which spent millions on the Copper River and Northwestern Railway, a 196-mile line to the port of Cordova, and on a mill, tramways and mines high on the mountain. Copper began to move by train in 1911, and by 1916 the camp was producing enormous tonnage, much of it as high-grade ore.

Life in the camp was hard. Men worked long shifts in cold, dark tunnels and hauled ore down aerial trams, and families lived in company housing beneath the fourteen-storey wood-frame mill. There was a school, a store and a dance hall. About 50 graves in the small Kennecott cemetery, used between 1908 and 1938, record the people who died there. The population fell from 494 in 1920 to 217 in 1930 as the best ore thinned and copper prices collapsed. The last train left on 10 November 1938, and only a handful of people stayed behind.

The buildings were left more or less as they stood, and today the National Park Service looks after the site inside Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. It is a National Historic Landmark and one of the best-preserved early copper-mining complexes in North America. The ghost stories are local and informal. Visitors and park workers have described phantom footsteps in empty streets, voices drifting through the mill and the sound of machinery clanking or groaning in a building that has not run for more than eighty years. Some tellers say the sounds are miners still going through their routine. A tale from the 1990s says that construction workers building a state housing tract along the old railroad bed heard wailing near old grave markers and lost tools from their belts, after which the plan was dropped.

None of these accounts names a witness or a date, and they should be treated as folklore that developed alongside tourism, with the real history of the town carrying more weight than the stories about it. Travel blogs add details such as unseen hands grabbing ankles and green glowing figures, which are more difficult to trace back to anyone. What the place does offer is a rare chance to see an industrial settlement frozen in time, which is exactly the kind of setting that invites the idea of a ‘residual’ haunting.

Reports include footsteps and voices in empty buildings, the sounds of machinery or hammering, shadowy figures inside the mill, wailing near the cemetery, and tools going missing, with most accounts coming from visitors, rangers and workers who were not named.

The red mill building and the surrounding mill town, the abandoned railway grade, and the Kennecott cemetery about a quarter mile south of the town.

Kennecott is the setting of Tom Kizzia’s history Cold Mountain Path, a staple of Alaska travel writing, and a stop on lists of the state’s haunted places.